Beryl Markham

Tom Campbell Black went on to remain a central figure in Golden Age long-distance flying.

He moved in the same circles as Beryl Markham, the Kenyan aviatrix who would make the first solo east-to-west Atlantic crossing in September of 1936, a more punishing feat than Lindbergh's crossing because she was flying against the prevailing winds the entire way.

That world of long-distance Golden Age pilots was small enough that its leading figures all knew each other, competed against each other, admired each other.

Campbell Black and the MacRobertson race were part of the fabric of that world.

I got all the kings are always out and about.

And then I thought of Beryl Markham, who is this female pilot in, I forget where in Africa she grew up, but I think she was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what she has this amazing memoir about her life as an aviator.

But yeah, there's types who are like really charismatic, but hard to pin down.

What are you taking?

Well, f- the thing I meant to say besides coffee and wine was a library, but that would be cheating So I guess it would be the book West with the Night, uh, it was by a woman, Beryl Markham, about, um, living in Africa with the Masai warriors and flying airplanes across the Atlantic, uh, racing horses, and the confronting tigers or lions on the hunt and...

Not the hunt.

They weren't hunting lions, the lions were hunting them.

And somewhere up there in the dark, a woman in a Percival Vega Gull, alone, flying against the same prevailing winds that Lindbergh had behind him when the whole world cheered.

Nobody was cheering for Beryl Markham, not because they didn't know her, not because they didn't think she could do it, but the ones who understood what east to west meant, what those headwinds would do to a fuel load, what 3,600 miles of open ocean looks like from the left seat at two in the morning with nothing on the radio and nothing below but black water.

Those people understood that she was attempting something the Atlantic had every intention of stopping.

I'm Tail Dragger.

It teaches you weather reading, the real kind, where you look at a ridgeline and you know in your gut whether there's turbulence on the lee side before you get there.

It teaches you that the airplane is a tool, not a toy, and that the gap between a good decision and a bad one is exactly as wide as the margin between going home and not going home.

By the mid-1930s, Beryl Markham had more time in the bush than most European aviators had total.

She had navigated thousands of miles of unmapped territory by dead reckoning.